


World of Stone

by Hokuto



Category: Death Gate Cycle - Margaret Weis & Tracy Hickman
Genre: Alternate Universe - Gender Changes, Alternate Universe - Science Fiction, Cyborgs, Gen, Introspection
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2012-12-20
Updated: 2012-12-20
Packaged: 2017-11-21 17:56:02
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,915
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/600546
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Hokuto/pseuds/Hokuto
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Abarrach, undead cyborg style.  Or: scenes from an SF AU of <em>Fire Sea</em> featuring female Haplo, her dog, and you guessed it, undead cyborgs.</p>
            </blockquote>





	World of Stone

**Author's Note:**

  * For [isbmlamloi](https://archiveofourown.org/users/isbmlamloi/gifts).



> Happy holidays, isbmlamloi! I hope this is at least a little to your taste.

"You didn't know," Haplo said.

Alfred wrung his hands, the fingers twisting together in a way that looked quite painful. "Beta Minos was meant to be a, a challenge, yes," he said, "perhaps harsh, but nothing more - something constructive to keep your people occupied, to teach them -"

Haplo growled, deep in her throat, and Alfred's voice stuttered into silence. "A challenge," she said. "It's a hell world!"

"We only planted the terraforming seeds for -"

"Those seeds? They were dragon's teeth and they came up monsters!" The dog whined unhappily at her tone, but she ignored it. "The ground grows nothing but rocks, thorns, and carnivorous plants - the only animals that can live on it are the things that want to eat _us_. We freeze by day and suffocate in the heat at night, the damn planet's wobbling makes calculating time a fool's game - and from every forsaken, blasted hole we've managed to survive in we have to watch that green 'paradise' moon you made hang over our heads, taunting us! That's a 'challenge,' all right!"

"We never meant for," Alfred said, his fingers practically in knots, "I'm so sorry -"

"Oh, sure, I believe that you were sorry," Haplo said. "So sorry that your people went right ahead and tore Terra apart to make new worlds you could rule - and that's worked out real well for everyone, hasn't it? How much of that damage is your 'sorry' going to fix?"

Alfred might have come up with an answer, though Haplo thought the probability was close to zero, but before he could the dog barked in alarm at the same moment that rows of red warning lights lit up along Haplo's arms, and the ship shuddered with an agonizing groan of stressed metal.

Haplo cursed and headed for the bridge. "I'm going to go see what the hell your people did to this world," she said to Alfred over her shoulder. "You stay right there and try not to fall over yourself too much - dog, keep him here."

The dog barked once in acknowledgment, then yelped as the ship shuddered again and settled on the floor, where it couldn't be knocked off its paws.

On the bridge, Haplo placed her left hand on the smooth metal control orb; its circuits lit up as they connected to the receptors on the back of her hand, and information about the World of Stone scrolled across the lens over her right eye. She took in barely any of it. Damn it, she shouldn't have lost her temper at the Sartan, no matter how righteously angry she had felt at the time - it wasn't like her, and it had distracted her from keeping track of the ship's condition. The harrowing trip through the wormhole had shaken her more than she wanted to admit, even to herself.

She heard the dog bark frantically as the ship began to tilt, as well as a crash that had to be Alfred, and hastily focused on the data coming in. A few seconds of attention, and Haplo understood why the ship was in trouble; it was floating on a river of magma.

Haplo bit off another curse and re-routed more power to the ship's lower shields, then scanned the air above - the ship was built for the cold of space, not lava, and though the shields ought to hold for a while it would be safer to get into the air. Unfortunately the scans painted a picture of a stalactite-filled ceiling; there would be no escape that way, and the ship was already heating up. Other sensors showed that the air outside of the ship, while mostly breathable, contained traces of numerous toxins in addition to the scorching heat. The Terran races could never have survived in such an atmosphere, not without Sartan technology to purify the air, and if they'd vanished on Abarrach as they had on Arianus and Pryan, then Haplo had most likely come here for nothing.

As Haplo took over control of the ship from the autopilot and guided it down the flowing magma, she thought that while she had called the Patryn's prison a hell world, Abarrach might equally deserve the name...

* * *

The dog didn't like the cyborgs.

It had given up barking at them, since they didn't react, but whenever one passed by on its business about the steamship, Haplo could feel a low growl rumbling through the dog's body, and its plumed tail would twitch like a cat's as if it wanted to spring and take a cyborg down.

Another one, under the watchful eye of the necrotech Jera, shuffled past the corner of the deck where Haplo and the dog had settled, and Haplo scratched the dog's ears to help keep it calm. If she were being honest with herself, the cyborgs made her a little uneasy, too; in some ways the technology that had been implanted in the Sartan dead to reanimate them and make them useful was not so different from that which the Patryn used to strengthen and protect themselves, but no Patryn technology could bring life to a corpse. Nor could it give that same hideous strength Haplo had seen the cyborgs display when Prince Edmund's little army had fought the one brought by Jera and Jonathan, a strength that couldn't be weakened by pain or fear or injury. There was a true prize for Haplo to bring back to Lord Xar, if she could find the design specs or sneak a sample of the tech, and yet...

Alfred could hardly stand to look at the cyborgs; he kept his eyes averted as much as possible, and if he happened to glance at one he'd swallow and look as if he might be sick. Haplo couldn't bring herself to begrudge him the feeling. Implants had never been the Sartan way - too similar to Patryn tech for their aesthetic tastes - but beyond that... The ghastly pallor of the cyborgs' skin, their blank stares and shuffling gait, these all were enough to put anyone off, and worst of all were the silent, pale blue projections that hovered over the shoulders of the cyborgs. The necrotechs called them "echoes," but had no explanation for them and seemed to prefer to ignore them, eyes sliding past the projections as they herded their charges. Haplo found her eyes continually drawn to the things by some strange fascination, as uncomfortable as they were to look at. There was something hopeless in the expressions on their small, transparent faces; sometimes she thought that they might almost be crying.

The dog whined, disrupting Haplo's morbid observations, and she stroked it, whispering a soothing word or two. Pah. She had spent too much time around Alfred, he was making her jumpy. She'd just keep observing, get into this city that Jera and Jonathan spoke of, get her hands on the secret of the undead cyborgs, and take it to Xar along with Alfred; Xar could put the tech to real use for the Patryn, and the hell with Haplo's uneasy feelings.

She rubbed the dog's ears, and it looked up at her with sad, soulful eyes. "Don't tell me," she said. "Hungry again, aren't you?"

The dog's tail thumped against the deck.

"Greedy beast," Haplo said, though she was feeling a little hungry herself. "Fine. Let's go see what they've got on board to fill that black hole you call a stomach."

* * *

Haplo would still have hated the Sartan of Abarrach, pitiful as they were, just for being Sartan. She hadn't realized how much she could hate them on a deep and personal level until they killed the dog.

She wanted to destroy them all. She probably could have, as primitive as their tech had become, if it weren't for those thrice-damned cyborgs and their shields, so instead she had to make do with playing unconscious - and even that was being ruined by Alfred's attempts to play nursemaid. She would have laughed if she weren't so angry, if there weren't a gaping void in her chest empty of every emotion but fury.

Haplo quietly allowed the city guards to separate her and Edmund from Alfred, let them haul her away into the city without fighting back, and promised herself that when she escaped, it wasn't going to be quiet and it wasn't going to be bloodless. The Sartan were going to pay for hurting her dog.

* * *

The rampant cyborgs pounded on the ship's shields, which sparked and flared and threatened to fail, but Haplo had made it to the control orb and in moments she had the ship up in the air, hovering between magma and stalactites. She set a course back to Death Gate, boosted the power to the shields, and finally took a minute to breathe; then she left the bridge and went to find Alfred.

He was still on the main deck, huddled in a forlorn heap, and the dog was licking his face. Haplo watched them for a long moment, waiting for her usual irritation with the Sartan to flare up, but she only felt tired. "C'mere, girl," she told the dog. "You can quit watching him now."

The dog looked over at her and wagged its tail, but didn't move.

"Fine," Haplo said, "be that way. Sar- Alfred."

Alfred pushed himself up on wobbling arms and said, "Are you going to take me to your lord now?"

That had been Haplo's plan, right up until - she wasn't sure when the plan had changed. Maybe around the time that she'd been poisoned, or sometime during the holographic recording that had played in the Chamber of Death, or when they had crossed the sea of lava... Did it matter? She whistled for the dog, and this time it bounded over to her. "I'm setting the coordinates to return to the Nexus," she said. "You've got ten minutes to get the hell off my ship, or you're going to be seeing Lord Xar whether you want to or not."

The look on Alfred's face could have been a mask for a comedy. "You're - letting me go?"

"Like I said, I'm going to set the coordinates," said Haplo. "Can't do that from here, so it's up to you whether you go or not - but I would recommend that you go."

"Thank you," Alfred said, "truly, thank you - I'm grateful to -"

"Just get out of here!" Haplo turned on her heel and stalked back to the bridge, the dog dancing around her feet. If she listened hard enough, she could almost hear the musical tones of Sartan technology at work as Alfred prepared to escape, but she wasn't going to waste energy on that. Of course. She had a report to write before she went through the wormhole, and she had no idea what she was going to put in this one... It had been a failure of a trip all around; Haplo had been lucky to get out with her skin intact, and even then it had only been thanks to that damn Alfred, which Lord Xar didn't need to hear.

She looked down at the dog, and it grinned back up at her, tail waving. "I suppose you're proud of yourself," she said to it, "causing as much trouble as you did - almost dying, dragging Alfred along everywhere he wasn't needed, cozying up to him..."

The dog barked once and settled down at her feet; Haplo sighed, put her hand on the control orb, and set her course for home.


End file.
